Was the Whole World Always A Nazi Bar?
On Giving Each Other Grace, the State of Free Speech, and Poor Things
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" as Solidarity Praxis
I’ve been thinking about what it means to speak out. When we choose to do it, where we choose to do it, and who has the privilege to do it. We are in a period of dire stakes and consequences re: Gaza, Sudan, Congo, climate change, and upcoming electoral politics, among many other urgent issues. There is a lot of social pressure in progressive circles to “say” something that also functions as a kind of “doing” something. This is particularly true of Palestine because Gazans have asked us to keep the pressure up. Calls to Congress are working. More and more consequential public figures and statespeople are revising their stances. There is substantial reporting on Israeli concerns that American disapproval may affect their ability to continue their siege on Palestine. Palestinians’ survival may very well partly hinge on our willingness to ensure that their plight doesn’t get lost in the news cycle as we become exhausted and complacent.
I routinely post and repost reminders on Instagram to do my due diligence, even when I can’t stomach the horror. I recently received a DM from a stranger defending their social media silence. They pleaded with me to understand that people are starting to lose jobs and opportunities due to public stances in defense of Gaza. The assumption is that I am 1) paying close attention to who is or isn’t posting about Palestine (rather than paying close attention to what’s actually happening there on the ground) and 2) assuming that posting on social media is the primary and most important locus of resistance. This person went as far as to tell me that they call Congress every day and inform themself about Palestinian history and follow that statement with an ask that I do not screenshot their messages to me and shame them publicly. I do not recognize this person, and I did not respond to them, but that they felt moved to write this way highlighted that we’ve lost the thread somewhere along the line.
I started polling my friends privately about their assumptions about their communities based on social media activity alone. They expressed a great deal of disappointment. Friendships waning, connections to communities watered down, and excitement about public figures dwindling due to their silence. Those freest to speak seem to remain silent often, while those with the most to lose are risking further and further loss for the sake of the integrity of their souls. I wrote in October about how we’re pointing fingers in the wrong places rather than following the money and recognizing how this effort upholds the American capitalist empire. I feel like a naive schoolteacher writing this, but I’m going to do it anyway: When ordinary people point fingers at ordinary people with limited privilege, we are taking aim at the wrong actors. Extremely powerful people in the public eye who are so materially privileged that they can afford to lose a little support for Palestine should be leading by example, speaking out publicly, using their clout and power to sway public opinion, and divesting from projects complicit with genocide. The same is true of the rest of us within the scope of our power, and this does not look the same for everyone. Should ordinary people, particularly Americans living paycheck to paycheck, be held to the same standard as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé? Just because posting about Palestine is, for once, materially useful to Palestinians and not just virtue signaling, are we entitled to shame each other for being fearful of no longer being able to pay rent for reposting a BBC video? What happened to “to each according to their ability”? What if what those who cannot speak or post or march are doing the support work necessary for those who can, but only if they have childcare, a meal waiting, someone to cover their shift, rub their legs upon return, someone to provide legal or economic support? Enough money to give up making a little money. Enough money to give up making any money at all.
What do we have to do to relatively safely start a loud public conversation about how the United States paints itself as a legitimate global arbiter of democracy and free speech when employers have the power to punish workers for taking issue with genocide? We now have book bans in this country, and are allowing public school systems to remove books that uphold civil rights and honor accurate accounts of history. As the electoral circus approaches, how do we make this part of the conversation? We are living in a moment of historic wins by labor unions and I wonder whether we can use that momentum to demand the right to speak in solidarity with the vulnerable and the suffering. Who is already doing this work, and what does it look like? How might we realign our impressions and conversations toward changing minds and ensuring that those who cannot afford public statements are still able to do the private work of informing themselves, investing in Palestinian arts and culture to ensure that their legacies are not lost, calling Congress, talking with their families and friends, and otherwise engaging with their moral responsibilities off of social media? In short, how can we withstand and move forward through heartbreak and spiritual exhaustion without adding to one another’s depletion? How can we have kinder conversations about what we’re willing and able to give up for Palestinian freedom? This is a real question for people in my community reading this newsletter who have done this work and research in a way I have never been able to. Talk to me.
Meanwhile, some reminders of our resources to keep up the political pressure:
EVERY DAY, text “Ceasefire” to 30403 and urge your reps to sign resolutions to end the siege on Gaza and put political pressure to prioritize humanitarian aid. The script can be as simple as: “My name is _______ calling as a constituent of ________ to urge a call for an immediate ceasefire and urge safe routes to humanitarian aid.” If you want to add some choice sentences about how Congress carries the responsibility for our collective complicity in ongoing evil, I encourage you to get as florid as please. Santa’s got a point system, after all, and the cosmic math is ugly enough to be described in abundant detail.
Contact the U.N.: https://usun.usmission.gov/mission/contact-us/
Contact The White House: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
On The Nazi Bar Argument and Substack
I’ve got murkier questions about free speech simmering on the Substack front. Laura Jedeed wrote about the Nazi bar metaphor in her last post before she jumped ship, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. In short, as per this Atlantic article, Substack’s Hamish McKenzie, when asked about Nazi Substackers, made the following statement:
“We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power…. Our content guidelines do have narrowly defined prescriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence. We will continue to actively enforce those rules while offering tools that let readers curate their own experiences and opt into their preferred communities. Beyond that, we will stick to our decentralized approach to content moderation, which gives power to readers and writers.”
Substack’s free speech guidelines censor pornography, and I strongly believe that preventing sex workers from making money by producing their own content on platforms like this, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, is fucked up. Laura Jedeed makes the argument that this free speech statement is baggy and avoids taking responsibility for making money from Nazi content. Clementine Morrigan, whose ideas I don’t always agree with but find interesting and provocative, makes the argument that sending Nazis elsewhere through censorship does not address the problem of their ideologies and their impact and that there’s some kind of sick irony to calling for censorship of hate speech when so many of us are being censored for calling for an end to genocide as hate speech framed as anti-Semitic when it is very explicitly not so. In short, this is not as cut-and-dry as calling for an end to the murder of innocent civilians who are mostly children.
The Nazi bar metaphor goes like this: A Nazi shows up at a punk bar and the bartender, generally unwilling to speak to anyone, throws him out brandishing a bat. He explains to the Redditor sharing this story that the first Nazi shows up alone, is polite, pays for his drink, end eventually brings a friend. That friend brings more friends, and while you’re still making excuses about how the first two did nothing wrong and did no harm to anyone, your bar has become a Nazi bar and you’re the one who has to leave. Substack is being taken to task for letting Nazis hang out until they inevitably take over.
Nazis are ubiquitous, and their capacity to infiltrate and completely colonize our online spaces to the point of altering the global political landscape has already proved itself. I’ve been observing as many writers I respect get the hell out for other platforms that, I can’t help but notice, do not have the same vital community structures that I love so much about Substack, and that also cannot prove being entirely devoid of Nazis and able to keep them at bay. I am in many ongoing conversations with fellow Substackers and subscribers about this debate, and worried that we will once again go the way of pointing fingers at each other rather than at the source of the issue. Some argue that our not standing our ground, so to speak, guarantees that Substack turns into a Nazi bar. Others argue that strategic choices must be made to force Substack’s hand or be a drain on their resources by keeping things from behind a paywall. Others still argue that the community structures that make Substack such a wonderful space are the very structures that might foment a resistance movement against Nazi Substackers. I can’t help but wonder whether a platform like Substack is a local punk bar, an “ours” the way a bar can be “ours,” rather than a bizarre and abstract field that, let’s face it, is a business that operates mostly on what benefits the bottom line. I don’t know that the comparison is fair.
I am still researching the pros and cons of multiple platforms and observing how this plays out. I hope to share my findings in a more organized fashion down the line. Meanwhile, I will not be putting anything behind a paywall until I can make an informed decision that I can stand behind explicitly. At the risk of seeming lazy or complicit, I will continue to share my work here until I learn how alternatives are implementing business models and TOS that favor the reduction of social harm. For now, I am not a heavy hitter. I’m not Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or someone whose actions constitute symbolic statements. I’m just, like most other people operating in good faith, I think, trying to make sure that I have whatever degree of integrity is available to me in this hellscape when I look in the mirror every day.
This week, these are the questions making up the additional rings around the open wound of my heartbreak about the government of the country I call home, how we continue to fund and uphold the slaughter of children, just like “we” did in Bangladesh in 1971 endangering my family and all of their people. These are the questions plaguing me as I finally start trusting and investing in my voice, only to recognize that the platforms that allow for it may be fine supporting the likes of those who would prefer us gone. I know firsthand the loss of legacy, culture, and personhood that comes from such eradications. What do we have to do, friends, to keep the whole world from becoming a Nazi bar, or have we been drinking alone with blinders on this whole time?
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
REORIENTING READS’ UNGHOSTED VIDEO IS NOW AVAILABLE!!
The Smithsonian shut down the 2023 Asian American Lit Festival, seemingly, though not officially, due to concerns about queer and trans writers’ work and presence being offensive or controversial for their sponsors. Together with many damning Op-Eds and an open letter, Asian American writers all over the country organized their own events in defiance, including the Uncanceled, Unghosted! Reading Room event, featuring Andrea Abi-Karam, George Abraham, H Felix Chau Bradley, Celeste Chan, 최 Lindsay, Chae(lee) Dalton, River 瑩瑩 Dandelion, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, Zeyn Joukhadar, Koomah, e.jin, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Trish Salah, Willy Wilkinson, and me, and was curated by Ching-In Chen, Noah Arhm Choi, Chrysanthemum, and Yanyi. This event filled me with pride for the deep bravery and talent in our communities, and doubled my resolve. I could not be prouder to have taken part, and am grateful that poets everywhere do not seem to flag in their belief in the fortifying power of our stories to keep up the fight against oppression, suppression, and social injustice everywhere. The reading is now available online if you missed it, and available for more opportunities to bathe in this brilliance even if you were there. I know that revisiting it was a crucial part of my entering into this new year with my head high and my spine straight.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: NEW YORK CITY POETS
One of my earliest poetry publications was in the little juggernaut journal, No, Dear Magazine which publishes the work of poets from across the five boroughs with an eye to uplifting underrepresented voices and giving a chance to poets who have never before published. I have had the honor of serving as a guest editor earlier in 2023, and am now very proud to serve No, Dear on their Board of Directors. If you are a New York City poet with thoughts on the theme “Descent,” please submit your poems by February 15!
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS:
”THE MEMORIES WE EAT” ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Over the past year, I invited folks who identify as South Asian, diasporic, and as having affinities with femmeness to participate in an oral history project of my own design called The Memories We Eat to explore the connections between our relationships with food and our bodies and our families’ immigration, independence, and/or Partition histories. My objective is to conduct more of these interviews before moving onto subjects with affinities with masculinity, and then again to subjects who have more explicit affinities to gender fluidity, transness, and non-binaryness to look at the ways the stories differ, if they do, and why. Ultimately, I will be transcribing these stories and anonymizing them to use them as the basis for a collection of found poems which may then make up the basis for a script for an experimental live performance about desi diasporic gender and food.
So far, having interviewed a handful of femme-identified subjects, I have heard wild stories about the foods that grounded folks’ identities, the ways food practices shape gender identity and roles, how parental eating habits imprint themselves regardless of explicit policy around mealtimes, how foodstuffs were used for protection against assault while under siege, and about the exhausting contradictions between finishing what’s on our plates and performing as the kinds of bodies that deem a family, and a woman, respectable. The most fruitful and surprising aspect of these interviews is how excited my participants have been to share their stories, how necessary it felt to them to have that space, and how much they seem to have thought about anew and learned about themselves just by answering basic questions about their experiences. If you identify with any of these categories and would like to participate in this long, ambitious project, please get in touch!
MICROREVIEW: POOR THINGS (SPOILERS!)
Yorgus Lanthimos (The Lobster, Dogtooth) stars a fantastic Emma Stone serving peak weird playing a version of the bride of Frankenstein in Poor Things (adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel by the same name) except in this case, Stone plays something like the daughter to a man who is both monster and doctor. Godwin (“God”) (Willem Defoe), the child of a sadistic surgeon scientist, was used in his father’s experiments and is a wild concentration of medical trauma that he seems to tacitly forgive given his deep admiration and emulation of his father’s commitment to science, however ill-advised. His creation, not unlike the original monster, adores him, but must eventually go off on her coming-of-age hero’s journey to find a mind of her own, question her humanity, and inevitably, the quality of humanity itself. However, this film, while gorgeously honoring Mary Shelley’s legacy through its expert, balletic aesthetic approaches, shifts its focus from humanity at large to the humanity of beings with female secondary sex characteristics under hegeomonic patriarchy in an absolutely hilarious and necessary examination of the male gaze in life and on screen.1
I said SPOILERS—Our monster Bella lives in an adult formerly-dead body is out of sync with the functioning of an adult mind because her brain is that of an infant’s. The dissonance is dramatic on its own, but wait—she’s also hot. Emma Stone is lithe and dancerly even in the robotic discordance of a body created on a surgical table, walking weirdly because her body is not quite hers, but also because she is a child learning how to walk. It provokes some important questions: Why is it possible to consider the sexual attractiveness of a baby? How have we developed a culture where we can impose our sexual desire on a body alone, regardless of the human being in there, even as the body’s very movements teach us our error immediately? The quality of the comedy in this film helps us ponder the question without ever making us feel preached at, yelled at, or otherwise hit over the head (today, I believe that’s my job). In the post-Roe era of increasing death due to suppression of bodily autonomy, this is exactly the film we need to remind the world what it means for a a being with female secondary sex characteristics to be treated like a human being with an autonomous mind and the right to ther own choices.
Imagine a grown woman body walking, talking, and thinking like an infant and watching everyone around her, despite the goo-goo ga-ga, despite the food pouring out of her mouth at dinner, despite the urine on the floor, still sexualizing her. The men linger on her. The camera lingers on her. The whole thing feels icky as shit. It’s not hard to imagine; many of AFAB folk hit age ten and their early teens only to discover that they are objects of desire for men aged thirteen through near-dead, but I have never seen the pathos of this fuckery as well dramatized as I did here. The quiet genius of the premise alone had me agape for all 2 hours and 21 mins of the movie, but then there were the stunningly theatrical visuals, fish-eye lenses, movements from black-and-white to color, and Jerskin Fendrix’s at times haunting and at times sprightly, often creeptastic but always gorgeous score. Emma Stone is a triumph whose embrace of her weird-as-shit era deeply excites me. A hilarious, slap-stick Mark Ruffalo is the symbolic emodiment of whiny, entitled male toxicity without, somehow, never seeming two-dimensional. Ramy Youssef’s careful sensitivity with a hapless, sensitive, deeply sweet character moved and surprised me throughout. Friends, this shit is so, so good.
Remember, I said SPOILERS—Godwin Baxter (Defoe), Duncan Wedderborn (Ruffalo), and Max McCandles (Youssef) wish Bella no physical harm, but all three, to greater and lesser degrees, attempt to manipulate, guilt, or food her into the roles that most convenience them. With the guileless clarity of a child, she understands this, but instead of being offended by it, she simply assesses the tools in her arsenal and deploys them to learn about the world and other people. She is somehow utterly innocent and completely realistic, which makes her absolutely impossible to men who expect their offerings to be more valuable to her than her hunger for knowledge. She wants to know the world, but also, she is, understandably, very excited by sex. How fun! Pleasure that requires nothing but the body! (The way sexual pleasure is a descendent of an infant discovering the joy of her own toes makes itself clear in a hilarious lunchtime scene that I will cherish for the rest of my days.) Having never been socialized to understand the point in “belonging” to a man sexually or otherwise, Bella slowly and steadily caves men’s brains in as we watch them spin like tops, rather on their own, as she walks jauntily off like a mechanical doll. We meet Duncan as a handsome, gross, fuckboy rake intent on whisking an innocent young thing away to corrupt and enjoy her, only to find that she is using him in kind. She is immune to charms he believes should have her groveling at his feet to love and marry her, and this alone is enough to send him over the edge. This bait and switch is so familiar with me that I couldn't help but cackle rather audibly in the theater. I can name many men who have been thunderstruck with butthurt when women in their lives did not magically abandon their dreams, aspirations, friends, or, commitment to personal and sexual autonomy because, supposedly, their love is such hot shit that one should find it enough to live on it and it alone.
So much of hegemonic heteronormativity still hinges on the romanticization of male possession of women. More than one AMAB person has said to me, as expression of their attraction to and appreciation for me, that they wished to bash me over the head with a stick and drag me into their cave. It’s a joke, of course, but that it’s a common expression invites us to examine its premise. Desire for me inspired a caveman instinct to violently knock me out and entrap me against my will, and I should find deeply flattering as a testament to how desirable I am both sexually and emotionally. I would be, suddenly, the core light in a household (cave) I’ve never been to and have yet to express any interest in. Expressing a disinterest in being made special in this way more often than not inspires a kind of offended shock. How appalling, how selfish, to resist the small sacrifice of complete personhood. An offense punishable, so often, so everywhere, to this day, punishable by violence and/or death.
Bella understands the power she wields over men due to their desire for her, and the risk she runs by making use of it when they do not care about her mind, soul, or comfort. The avenues to freedom are denied her time and time again due to the voracious male need to trap and possess the buoyant light and adventurous spirit that makes her so appealing in the first place. The questions Poor Things poses about life extend, of course, to the patriarchal and sexualized gaze upon the female body in film and television. When we go to the movies and see entirely nude actors playing characters in intimate circumstances, what are the various psychological systems at play? How does the way movies prime us to witness their bodies affect our understanding of the humanity of bodies, our own humanity, that of the actors, and the characters they’re playing? I love a weird medical romance because it dramatizes radical exchanges of reliance, and exposes what motivates people to care for others, spontaneously or routinely, and what corrupt pay-offs and genuine joys lie in relationships in which the vulnerability and complex failure of the human body are, and remain, at the surface of most interaction.
If you know me in person, you’ve likely heard me rant one of my many queer poly frustration rants about the capitalist objectification of the female human body has normalized carnal objectification to the point where we do not see it as a pathology. The idea of sharing pleasure with another person is so untethered from sex and sexuality in public, popular, heteronormative discourse that we’ve reduced our bodies to loci of sexual power rather than animal things that connect and gravitate toward and away from one another in a complex game of subjective, pheremonal magic. There have been multiple recent articles2 about how the sex scene “died” for years after #metoo and is just now returning to the scene. I am offended by the suggestion that demanding that people not be sexually harassed or worse on set has killed the culture industry’s capacity to safely and intelligently write and produce good sex scenes (and I do not mean, by this, representations of good sex, but good representations of all kinds of sex, which we need much more of). This film feels almost like a response to that accusation, featuring lots and lots of sex scenes of various kinds without compromising pleasure, power, or how both play out together in life and on the screen. Go see it.
Prompt for poetry or fiction inspired by Poor Things:
Take a nonsensical, unjust human practice and question it from the voice of a child living in an adult body without revealing that this is the case. This can take the form of a series of questions, integrate the verbal magic and confusion of a child learning to speak, and/or include responses from an interlocutor.
If you’re unfamiliar with the groundbreaking work of Laura Mulvey, who coined the term “male gaze,” Youtuber Mrs. Fisher has a short and simple primer here. If you want a denser, graduate-level breakdown of psychoanalytic feminism and the male gaze, this Film and Media Studies video should do the trick.)
See: Esquire’s The Sex Scene is Dead; The Atlantic’s The Death of the Sex Scene, and The New Yorker’s The Sex Scene is Dead. Long Live the Sex Scene.